WEATHER
Temperatures to drop today
Yesterday’s warm and sunny weather are to give way to rain and lower temperatures today as seasonal winds from the northeast pick up, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The change would be more pronounced in the north and northeast, where highs are likely to slide from nearly 30°C to about 20°C, the bureau said. Lows in those areas are expected to drop by up to 3°C today, while the chance of rain would increase from about midday, forecasters said. Elsewhere, highs could fall by 3°C to 6°C and lows by up to 3°C, the bureau said. The bureau also warned there could be strong winds east and north of Tainan, particularly in open and coastal areas. The cool weather is to ease again on Wednesday and warm temperatures should return before Saturday, it added.
TRAVEL
East Rift Valley in bloom
In the East Rift Valley in Taitung County, field after field of garden cosmos flowers are blooming at the start of the Lunar New Year holiday. The pink and white blossoms stretch across 20 hectares in Luye Township’s (鹿野) Rueilong Village (瑞隆) and are expected to remain in bloom at least until the end of the holiday on Feb. 10, Luye Mayor Lee Kuo-chiang (李國強) said. The best views for visitors driving through the township are along the Er Ceng Ping Canal (二層坪水圳), off Provincial Highway No. 9, he said. Motorists may use makeshift parking places in the fallow paddies near the fields to prevent congestion on the winding country roads, he said. Apart from the fields in Rueilong, there are also 13 hectares of sunflowers at the Rice County School, a tourist attraction in neighboring Guanshan Township (關山), Lee said.
DEMOGRAPHY
Working-age population falls
The working-age population fell to a record-low 72.52 percent of citizens at the end of last year, indicating a growing burden on the workforce, Ministry of the Interior data published on Saturday showed. The working-age population, defined as people aged 15 to 64, was 17.11 million at the end of last year, the lowest since 2012, the ministry said. Meanwhile, people older than 65 accounted for 14.56 percent of the population, while children aged up to 14 made up 12.92 percent, the data showed. It meant that Taiwan’s aging index, defined as the ratio of citizens older than 65 to those aged up to 14, rose to 112.64, an 83 percent increase from 61.51 at the end of 2008. Over the 10-year period, the population younger than 15 shrank by 4.03 percent, while the population older than 65 grew 4.13 percent, the ministry said.
CRIME
Online betting arrests made
Kaohsiung police on Friday arrested 10 people and seized NT$623,000 (US$20,263) in a raid on a gambling ring that was allegedly running an online operation, the city’s Yancheng Precinct said yesterday. Police also seized 18 mobile phones, 36 computers, tablets and laptops, five monitors and other electronic devices. They said that the online gambling ring was operated on the scale of a company, with various business divisions, including a control room, and promotional and customer services sections. Clients were solicited on social media and could place bets once they bought at least NT$1,000 of online credit, with payments made via a third-party service provider, police said. Since the gambling Web site was established in October last year, it had processed more than NT$250 million in bets and the operators made a profit of about NT$47.7 million, police said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching